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Sometimes packages die from a more conceptual point of view, because they are implemented based on an incorrect premise... These can often be fixed, if often reluctantly (*cough* Module::Build and PREFIX *cough*):)

"Incorrect premise" is about the nicest thing anyone can say about PREFIX. If you were going for accuracy, you might have said "Why would anyone have ever thought this could possibly work correctly?"

You say that as if you believed that it were possible to be compatible with PREFIX. Given that even Schwern believes that the feature just plain doesn't work, how in the world would the M::B developers ever satisfy you? If they made it do what everyone seems to think it does, they've broken compatibility with it. If they somehow magically made it do what it actually does, they get complaints that it doesn't work the way everyone thinks it does.

If you're suggesting that the only sane approach was not to support it at all, perhaps toning down your anti-M::B rhetoric in the future could help avoid similar fiascoes.

I'm suggesting that the toolchain is a single entity.You can't just invent entirely new standards and make half a dependency chain act differently to the other half of the toolchain. It breaks the entire

So either Module::Build [cpan.org] should be bug-compatible with the way that PREFIX works, or the Module::Build people should have worked with the rest of the toolchain to deprecate the entire feature across the entire thing, while leading a suitable replacement that required no increase in work from the user.

All this while I thought the important half of the phrase "backwards compatibility" was "compatibility".

If the "whole toolchain" really is a single entity, then we ought to consider MakeMaker severely broken on platforms that don't include a working make utility. Should M::B not work on those platforms, for the sake of backwards?

I really can't see how it's possible to be compatible with a feature as broken as PREFIX. If you support it as it worked in EU::MM, then you surprise everyone who expects it to do something sane instead of spewing files randomly over the filesystem. If you make it work so that it does something sane, it doesn't work the same way that EU::MM does.